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Show notes

On the show today, the physiology behind the best women's Grand Tour we can remember, and a doping ban that fits a pattern we have seen many times before.

• (00:01:00) The Tour de France Femmes was, we think, the best Grand Tour either of us has watched in years, and we explore the nine stages of unpredictable racing that had us intrigued, even if the record will show that Demi Vollering won four of them.
• (00:05:56) Kasia Niewiadoma's ride on Mont Ventoux, at somewhere between 5.3 and 5.6 W/kg for the climb, is arguably the greatest climbing performance in the history of women's cycling, and we place it against the published power duration curves to show just how far outside the 90th percentile it sits.
• (00:17:19) Niewiadoma also posted 9.9 W/kg for 86 seconds, and from that single Strava screenshot we work out her FTP and her W', the anaerobic "battery", which lets us answer the question everyone argued about, namely whether being blocked into that corner actually cost her time to rival Vollering. We think the answer is unequivocally yes, and the maths and the principle of pacing explains why.
• (00:25:50) Praise for Puck Pieterse, sympathy for Marlen Reusser and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, and a wonder about the 'mature' podium, and the prospect of a handover to the next generation in good time, just not 'our time'
• (00:41:41) The World U20 Championships, where a 17 year old ran 7:28 solo for 3000m, Tate Taylor doubled up in 9.94 and 19.83, and the ever-turning carousel of youth talent that is sometimes derailed by injury and sometimes deposed by the next young phenom
• (00:45:46) Jakob Ingebrigtsen returns and wins the European 5000m title in 13:16, off a slow race that played into his hands, and he explains, correctly, that a 5000m is not a test of speed but of how much speed you have left. He also promises he'll be "astonishingly a lot better" next time.
• (00:52:32) Jonah Koech gets a three year ban after an adverse passport finding. We explain how the biological passport actually works, why two suspicious samples means the values must have been wildly out of the norm, and why his 3.2% improvement should have invited scepticism long before the blood results did. Performance is not proof, but pattern recognition lives on, with this its latest illustration.
• (01:07:46) The WNBA has no eligibility policy, so two former NBA players have declared for the women's draft to prove the point. We discuss why choosing not to decide is itself a decision, how people are choosing to pretend a problem doesn't exist (or that it doesn't matter if it does), and contrast this with the WTA who have implemented screening for eligibility, and just gotten on with it
• (01:15:29) And finally, the origins of the steeplechase, which begins with two blokes, an Irish pub, a wager, and two church steeples. Plus a nutritionist on social media who watched 96 seconds and decided we had lost all credibility.

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Ross Hemingway, OBE, is a Sport & Exercise Medicine Practitioner at the Commando Training Centre for the Royal Marines. His clinical expertise centres on exertional collapse, in particular the prevention, acute management, and rehabilitation of exertional heat illness (EHI) in elite, amateur, and tactical athletes, and is recognised as a UK national expert in this field. Hemingway is also a member of the UK Heat Illness Advisory Group and a contributing author to the Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care’s (FPHC) UK consensus statement on the management of Exertional Heat Illness.

In this interview, Hemingway breaks down the theory of heat illness, how it happens, prevalence, and the best ways of dealing with EHI during exercise.

Alongside his clinical practice, he is also the founder of Nereus Medical Ltd and inventor of the patented I-CWIK, a lightweight, robust and clinically proven system developed to provide effective cold-water immersion of heat stroke casualties in the pre-hospital and hospital environment.

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SHOW NOTES

The EHI Consensus Statement website

The Full EHI Article, of which Ross is lead author

One of the studies Ross alluded to, this one from the World Champs in Doha

Another paper he mentioned, discussing athlete management ahead of the Olympic Games

The baboon model for heatstroke discussed on the show

We published a study years back documenting some heatstrokes in SA endurance events

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